Victorian hack Hector Mortlake and his trusty valet Cuthbert are at it again. This third outing takes them to the Scottish Highlands - but that's just the start. A mysterious portal and a ghostly gang of ghouls threaten to separate the pair for good. With a host of new characters and their craziest story yet, Hector and Cuthbert deliver high adventure and shameless innuendo in equal measure. Fans of William Stafford's inimitable style will not be disappointed.

1857: On an extended visit to her cousins in London, country girl Lizzie struggles to adapt to her new life of stiff manners and formal pastimes at No. 6 Chelsea Walk. And her dream of becoming a gardener is certainly frowned upon. But like her elder cousin, who wants to defy her middle-class upbringing and become a nurse, Lizzie has the strength of will to act against stifling Victorian conventions. And the chance to visit the newly opened Kew Gardens presents her with the ideal opportunity to start working towards her grand ambition... Adele Geras has previously been shortlisted for the Whitbread Children's Book Award and Highly Commended for the Carnegie Medal. "Dramatic stories with a real sense of atmosphere." - The Guardian

Following the success of his award-winning memoir There is a Season (2004) and his bestselling novel Red Dog, Red Dog (2008), Patrick Lane felt his celebrated poetry career might be at an end and published his Collected Poems in 2011. But the process of revisiting his collected poetic works rekindled his first love and launched him on a new phase of poetry composition that resulted in this impressive and distinctive new book.Honest and self-aware, Washita evokes some of the most inexpressible experiences a human being can undergo: the loss of a parent, the breakdown of a body, the perversion of nature, the acquiring of wisdom. In "Hard-Rock," a boy begins to understand that his father will die: "His lungs created elaborate cathedrals from quartz dust, / a crystal symphony playing Mahler under water." In "Submission," a speaker struggles with losing his sight, capable only of expressing himself through metaphor. But amid this darkness sparks an...

The #1 Kids' Video Game! Lightning Rod Faces the Cyclops Queen is the third book in an ongoing Mask of Power series of original novels set in the Skylanders universe. These all-new stories feature favorite characters from all the Skylanders games.

When Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions for his heirs to burn the 138 handwritten index cards that made up the rough draft of his final and unfinished novel, The Original of Laura. But Nabokov's wife, Vera, could not bear to destroy her husband's last work, and when she died, the fate of the manuscript fell to her son. Dmitri Nabokov, now seventy-five--the Russian novelist's only surviving heir, and translator of many of his books--has wrestled for three decades with the decision of whether to honor his father's wish or preserve for posterity the last piece of writing of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His decision finally to allow publication of the fragmented narrative--dark yet playful, preoccupied with mortality--affords us one last experience of Nabokov's magnificent creativity, the quintessence of his unparalleled body of work.Photos of the handwritten index cards accompany the text. They are perforated and can be...

The days of summer are numbered. As Eiji Miyake's twentieth birthday nears, he arrives in Tokyo with a mission - to find the father he has never met.number9dream follows Eiji on a search that leads through the seething city's underworld, its lost property offices and video arcades; through his own imaginings, dreams and memories; via his alcoholic mother's letters, the manuscript of an attic fabulist, and the journal of a wartime torpedo pilot; to encounters with a syndicate of organ harvesters, John Lennon, and the god of thunder; and finally back to the rainy southern island of Yakushima, where everything that matters to Eiji began and ended.David Mitchell's second novel belongs in a Far Eastern, multi-textual, urban-pastoral, road-movie-of-the-mind, cyber-metaphysical, detective/family chronicle, coming-of-age-love-story genre of one.